XXII

Fauntleroy

FIVE-AND-TWENTY
years
ago, at the epoch of this
story, there dwelt, in one of the middle states, a
man whom we shall call Fauntleroy; a man of
wealth, and magnificent tastes, and prodigal
expenditure. His home might almost be styled a
palace; his habits, in the ordinary sense,
princely. His whole being seemed to have
crystallized itself into an external splendor,
wherewith he glittered in the eyes of the world,
and had no other life than upon this gaudy
surface. He had married a lovely woman, whose
nature was deeper than his own. But his affection
for her, though it showed largely, was
superficial, like all his other manifestations and
developments; he did not so truly keep this noble
creature in his heart, as wear her beauty for the
most brilliant ornament of his outward state. And
there was born to him a child, a beautiful
daughter, whom he took from the beneficent hand of
God with no just sense of her immortal value, but
as a man, already rich in gems, would receive
another jewel. If he loved her, it was because
she shone.

After Fauntleroy
had thus spent a few empty years,
corruscating continually an unnatural light, the
source of it--which was merely his gold--began to
grow more shallow, and finally became exhausted.
He saw himself in imminent peril of losing all
that had heretofore distinguished him; and,
conscious of no innate worth to fall back upon, he
recoiled from this calamity, with the instinct of
a soul shrinking from annihilation. To avoid
it--wretched man!--or, rather, to defer it, if but
for a month, a day, or only to procure himself the
life of a few breaths more, amid the false glitter
which was now less his own than ever--he made
himself guilty of a crime. It was just the sort
of crime, growing out of its artificial state,
which society (unless it should change its entire
constitution for this man's unworthy sake) neither
could nor ought to pardon. More safely might it
pardon murder. Fauntleroy's guilt was discovered.
He fled; his wife perished by the necessity of her
innate nobleness, in its alliance with a being so
ignoble; and betwixt her mother's death and her
father's ignominy, his daughter was left worse
than orphaned.

There was
no pursuit after Fauntleroy. His
family-connections, who had great wealth, made
such arrangements with those whom he had attempted
to wrong, as secured him from the retribution that
would have overtaken an unfriended criminal. The
wreck of his estate was divided among his
creditors. His name, in a very brief space, was
forgotten by the multitude who had passed it so
diligently from mouth to mouth. Seldom, indeed,
was it recalled, even by his closest former
intimates. Nor could it have been otherwise. The
man had laid no real touch on any mortal's heart.
Being a mere image, an optical delusion, created
by the sunshine of prosperity, it was his law to
vanish into the shadow of the first intervening
cloud. He seemed to leave no vacancy; a
phenomenon which, like many others that attended
his brief career, went far to prove the
illusiveness of his existence.

Not, however,
that the physical substance of
Fauntleroy had literally melted into vapor. He
had fled northward, to the New England metropolis,
and had taken up his abode, under another name, in
a squalid street, or court, of the older portion
of the city. There he dwelt among
poverty-stricken wretches, sinners, and forlorn,
good people, Irish, and whomsoever else were
neediest. Many families were clustered in each
house together, above stairs and below, in the
little peaked garrets, and even in the dusky
cellars. The house, where Fauntleroy paid weekly
rent for a chamber and a closet, had been a
stately habitation, in its day. An old colonial
Governor had built it, and lived there, long ago,
and held his levees in a great room where now
slept twenty Irish bedfellows, and died in
Fauntleroy's chamber, which his embroidered and
white-wigged ghost still haunted. Tattered
hangings, a marble hearth, traversed with many
cracks and fissures, a richly-carved oaken
mantel-piece, partly hacked-away for
kindling-stuff, a stuccoed ceiling, defaced with
great, unsightly patches of the naked laths;--such
was the chamber's aspect, as if, with its
splinters and rags of dirty splendor, it were a
kind of practical gibe at this poor, ruined man of
show.

At first,
and at irregular intervals, his
relatives allowed Fauntleroy a little pittance to
sustain life; not from any love, perhaps, but lest
poverty should compel him, by new offences, to add
more shame to that with which he had already
stained them. But he showed no tendency to
further guilt. His character appeared to have
been radically changed (as, indeed, from its
shallowness, it well might) by his miserable fate;
or, it may be, the traits now seen in him were
portions of the same character, presenting itself
in another phase. Instead of any longer seeking
to live in the sight of the world, his impulse was
to shrink into the nearest obscurity, and to be
unseen of men, were it possible, even while
standing before their eyes. He had no pride; it
was all trodden in the dust. No ostentation; for
how could it survive, when there was nothing left
of Fauntleroy, save penury and shame! His very
gait demonstrated that he would gladly have faded
out of view, and have crept about invisibly, for
the sake of sheltering himself from the
irksomeness of a human glance. Hardly, it was
averred, within the memory of those who knew him
now, had he the hardihood to show his full front
to the world. He skulked in corners, and crept
about in a sort of noonday twilight, making
himself gray and misty, at all hours, with his
morbid intolerance of sunshine.

In his
torpid despair, however, he had done an act
which that condition of the spirit seems to
prompt, almost as often as prosperity and hope.
Fauntleroy was again married. He had taken to
wife a forlorn, meek-spirited, feeble young woman,
a seamstress, whom he found dwelling with her
mother in a contiguous chamber of the old
gubernatorial residence. This poor phantom--as
the beautiful and noble companion of his former
life had done--brought him a daughter. And
sometimes, as from one dream into another,
Fauntleroy looked forth out of his present grimy
environment, into that past magnificence, and
wondered whether the grandee of yesterday or the
pauper of to-day were real. But, in my mind, the
one and the other were alike impalpable. In
truth, it was Fauntleroy's fatality to behold
whatever he touched dissolve. After a few years,
his second wife (dim shadow that she had always
been) faded finally out of the world, and left
Fauntleroy to deal as he might with their pale and
nervous child. And, by this time, among his
distant relatives--with whom he had grown a weary
thought, linked with contagious infamy, and which
they were only too willing to get rid of--he was
himself supposed to be no more.

The younger
child, like his elder one, might be
considered as the true offspring of both parents,
and as the reflection of their state. She was a
tremulous little creature, shrinking involuntarily
from all mankind, but in timidity, and no sour
repugnance. There was a lack of human substance
in her; it seemed as if, were she to stand up in a
sunbeam, it would pass right through her figure,
and trace out the cracked and dusty window-panes
upon the naked floor. But, nevertheless, the poor
child had a heart; and from her mother's gentle
character, she had inherited a profound and still
capacity of affection. And so her life was one of
love. She bestowed it partly on her father, but,
in greater part, on an idea.

For Fauntleroy,
as they sat by their cheerless
fireside--which was no fireside, in truth, but
only a rusty stove--had often talked to the little
girl about his former wealth, the noble loveliness
of his first wife, and the beautiful child whom
she had given him. Instead of the fairy tales,
which other parents tell, he told Priscilla this.
And, out of the loneliness of her sad little
existence, Priscilla's love grew, and tended
upward, and twined itself perseveringly around
this unseen sister; as a grape-vine might strive
to clamber out of a gloomy hollow among the rocks,
and embrace a young tree, standing in the sunny
warmth above. It was almost like worship, both in
its earnestness and its humility; nor was it the
less humble, though the more earnest, because
Priscilla could claim human kindred with the being
whom she so devoutly loved. As with worship, too,
it gave her soul the refreshment of a purer
atmosphere. Save for this singular, this
melancholy, and yet beautiful affection, the child
could hardly have lived; or, had she lived, with a
heart shrunken for lack of any sentiment to fill
it, she must have yielded to the barren miseries
of her position, and have grown to womanhood,
characterless and worthless. But, now, amid all
the sombre coarseness of her father's outward
life, and of her own, Priscilla had a higher and
imaginative life within. Some faint gleam thereof
was often visible upon her face. It was as if, in
her spiritual visits to her brilliant sister, a
portion of the latter's brightness had permeated
our dim Priscilla, and still lingered, shedding a
faint illumination through the cheerless chamber,
after she came back.

As the
child grew up, so pallid and so slender,
and with much unaccountable nervousness, and all
the weaknesses of neglected infancy still haunting
her, the gross and simple neighbors whispered
strange things about Priscilla. The big, red,
Irish matrons, whose innumerable progeny swarmed
out of the adjacent doors, used to mock at the
pale Western child. They fancied--or, at least,
affirmed it, between jest and earnest--that she
was not so solid flesh and blood as other
children, but mixed largely with a thinner
element. They called her ghost-child, and said
that she could indeed vanish, when she pleased,
but could never, in her densest moments, make
herself quite visible. The sun, at mid-day, would
shine through her; in the first gray of the
twilight, she lost all the distinctness of her
outline; and, if you followed the dim thing into a
dark corner, behold! she was not there. And it
was true, that Priscilla had strange ways; strange
ways, and stranger words, when she uttered any
words at all. Never stirring out of the old
Governor's dusky house, she sometimes talked of
distant places and splendid rooms, as if she had
just left them. Hidden things were visible to
her, (at least, so the people inferred from
obscure hints, escaping unawares out of her
mouth,) and silence was audible. And, in all the
world, there was nothing so difficult to be
endured, by those who had any dark secret to
conceal, as the glance of Priscilla's timid and
melancholy eyes.

Her peculiarities
were the theme of continual
gossip among the other inhabitants of the
gubernatorial mansion. The rumor spread thence
into a wider circle. Those who knew old
Moodie--as he was now called--used often to jeer
him, at the very street-corners, about his
daughter's gift of second-sight and prophecy. It
was a period when science (though mostly through
its empirical professors) was bringing forward,
anew, a hoard of facts and imperfect theories,
that had partially won credence, in elder times,
but which modern scepticism had swept away as
rubbish. These things were now tossed up again,
out of the surging ocean of human thought and
experience. The story of Priscilla's
preternatural manifestations, therefore, attracted
a kind of notice of which it would have been
deemed wholly unworthy, a few years earlier. One
day, a gentleman ascended the creaking staircase,
and inquired which was old Moodie's chamber-door.
And, several times, he came again. He was a
marvellously handsome man, still youthful, too,
and fashionably dressed. Except that Priscilla,
in those days, had no beauty, and, in the languor
of her existence, had not yet blossomed into
womanhood, there would have been rich food for
scandal in these visits; for the girl was
unquestionably their sole object, although her
father was supposed always to be present. But, it
must likewise be added, there was something about
Priscilla that calumny could not meddle with; and
thus far was she privileged, either by the
preponderance of what was spiritual, or the thin
and watery blood that left her cheek so pallid.

Yet, if
the busy tongues of the neighborhood
spared Priscilla, in one way, they made themselves
amends by renewed and wilder babble, on another
score. They averred that the strange gentleman
was a wizard, and that he had taken advantage of
Priscilla's lack of earthly substance to subject
her to himself, as his familiar spirit, through
whose medium he gained cognizance of whatever
happened, in regions near or remote. The
boundaries of his power were defined by the verge
of the pit of Tartarus, on the one hand, and the
third sphere of the celestial world, on the other.
Again, they declared their suspicion that the
wizard, with all his show of manly beauty, was
really an aged and wizened figure, or else that
his semblance of a human body was only a
necromantic, or perhaps a mechanical contrivance,
in which a demon walked about. In proof of it,
however, they could merely instance a gold band
around his upper teeth, which had once been
visible to several old women, when he smiled at
them from the top of the Governor's staircase. Of
course, this was all absurdity, or mostly so.
But, after every possible deduction, there
remained certain very mysterious points about the
stranger's character, as well as the connection
that he established with Priscilla. Its nature,
at that period, was even less understood than now,
when miracles of this kind have grown so
absolutely stale, that I would gladly, if the
truth allowed, dismiss the whole matter from my
narrative.

We must
now glance backward, in quest of the
beautiful daughter of Fauntleroy's prosperity.
What had become of her? Fauntleroy's only
brother, a bachelor, and with no other relative so
near, had adopted the forsaken child. She grew up
in affluence, with native graces clustering
luxuriantly about her. In her triumphant progress
towards womanhood, she was adorned with every
variety of feminine accomplishment. But she
lacked a mother's care. With no adequate control,
on any hand, (for a man, however stern, however
wise, can never sway and guide a female child,)
her character was left to shape itself. There was
good in it, and evil. Passionate, self-willed,
and imperious, she had a warm and generous nature;
showing the richness of the soil, however, chiefly
by the weeds that flourished in it, and choked up
the herbs of grace. In her girlhood, her uncle
died. As Fauntleroy was supposed to be likewise
dead, and no other heir was known to exist, his
wealth devolved on her, although, dying suddenly,
the uncle left no will. After his death, there
were obscure passages in Zenobia's history. There
were whispers of an attachment, and even a secret
marriage, with a fascinating and accomplished, but
unprincipled young man. The incidents and
appearances, however, which led to this surmise,
soon passed away and were forgotten.

Nor was
her reputation seriously affected by the
report. In fact, so great was her native power
and influence, and such seemed the careless purity
of her nature, that whatever Zenobia did was
generally acknowledged as right for her to do.
The world never criticised her so harshly as it
does most women who transcend its rules. It
almost yielded its assent, when it beheld her
stepping out of the common path, and asserting the
more extensive privileges of her sex, both
theoretically and by her practice. The sphere of
ordinary womanhood was felt to be narrower than
her development required.

A portion
of Zenobia's more recent life is told in
the foregoing pages. Partly in earnest--and, I
imagine, as was her disposition, half in a proud
jest, or in a kind of recklessness that had grown
upon her, out of some hidden grief--she had given
her countenance, and promised liberal pecuniary
aid, to our experiment of a better social state.
And Priscilla followed her to Blithedale. The
sole bliss of her life had been a dream of this
beautiful sister, who had never so much as known
of her existence. By this time, too, the poor
girl was enthralled in an intolerable bondage,
from which she must either free herself or perish.
She deemed herself safest near Zenobia, into whose
large heart she hoped to nestle.

One evening,
months after Priscilla's departure,
when Moodie (or shall we call him Fauntleroy?) was
sitting alone in the state-chamber of the old
Governor, there came footsteps up the staircase.
There was a pause on the landing-place. A lady's
musical, yet haughty accents were heard making an
inquiry from some denizen of the house, who had
thrust a head out of a contiguous chamber. There
was then a knock at Moodie's door.

And Zenobia
entered. The details of the interview
that followed, being unknown to me--while,
notwithstanding, it would be a pity quite to lose
the picturesqueness of the situation--I shall
attempt to sketch it, mainly from fancy, although
with some general grounds of surmise in regard to
the old man's feelings.

She gazed,
wonderingly, at the dismal chamber.
Dismal to her, who beheld it only for an instant,
and how much more so to him, into whose brain each
bare spot on the ceiling, every tatter of the
paper-hangings, and all the splintered carvings of
the mantel-piece, seen wearily through long years,
had worn their several prints! Inexpressibly
miserable is this familiarity with objects that
have been, from the first, disgustful.

"I have
received a strange message," said Zenobia,
after a moment's silence, "requesting, or rather
enjoining it upon me, to come hither. Rather from
curiosity than any other motive--and because,
though a woman, I have not all the timidity of
one--I have complied. Can it be you, sir, who
thus summoned me?"

"And what
was your purpose?" she continued. "You
require charity, perhaps? In that case, the
message might have been more fitly worded. But
you are old and poor; and age and poverty should
be allowed their privileges. Tell me, therefore,
to what extent you need my aid."

"Put up
your purse," said the supposed mendicant,
with an inexplicable smile. "Keep it--keep all
your wealth--until I demand it all, or none! My
message had no such end in view. You are
beautiful, they tell me; and I desired to look at
you!"

He took
the one lamp that showed the discomfort
and sordidness of his abode, and approaching
Zenobia, held it up, so as to gain the more
perfect view of her, from top to toe. So obscure
was the chamber, that you could see the reflection
of her diamonds thrown upon the dingy wall, and
flickering with the rise and fall of Zenobia's
breath. It was the splendor of those jewels on
her neck, like lamps that burn before some fair
temple, and the jewelled flower in her hair, more
than the murky yellow light, that helped him to
see her beauty. But he beheld it, and grew proud
at heart; his own figure, in spite of his mean
habiliments, assumed an air of state and grandeur.

"It is
well!" cried old Moodie. "Keep your
wealth. You are right worthy of it. Keep it,
therefore, but with one condition, only!"

"Have you
none to care for you?" asked she. "No
daughter?--no kind-hearted neighbor?--no means of
procuring the attendance which you need? Tell me,
once again, can I do nothing for you?"

"Nothing," he
replied. "I have beheld what I
wished. Now, leave me! Linger not a moment
longer; or I may be tempted to say what would
bring a cloud over that queenly brow. Keep all
your wealth, but with only this one condition. Be
kind--be no less kind than sisters are--to my poor
Priscilla!"

And, it
may be, after Zenobia withdrew, Fauntleroy
paced his gloomy chamber, and communed with
himself, as follows:--or, at all events, it is the
only solution, which I can offer, of the enigma
presented in his character.

"I am
unchanged--the same man as of yore!" said
he. "True; my brother's wealth, he dying
intestate, is legally my own. I know it; yet, of
my own choice, I live a beggar, and go meanly
clad, and hide myself behind a forgotten ignominy.
Looks this like ostentation? Ah, but, in Zenobia,
I live again! Beholding her so beautiful--so fit
to be adorned with all imaginable splendor of
outward state--the cursed vanity, which,
half-a-lifetime since, drops off like tatters of
once gaudy apparel from my debased and ruined
person, is all renewed for her sake! Were I to
re-appear, my shame would go with me from darkness
into daylight. Zenobia has the splendor, and not
the shame. Let the world admire her, and be
dazzled by her, the brilliant child of my
prosperity! It is Fauntleroy that still shines
through her!"

"My poor
Priscilla! And am I just, to her, in
surrendering all to this beautiful Zenobia?
Priscilla! I love her best--I love her only!--but
with shame, not pride. So dim, so pallid, so
shrinking--the daughter of my long calamity!
Wealth were but a mockery in Priscilla's hands.
What is its use, except to fling a golden radiance
around those who grasp it? Yet, let Zenobia take
heed! Priscilla shall have no wrong!"

But, while
the man of show thus meditated--that
very evening, so far as I can adjust the dates of
these strange incidents Priscilla--poor, pallid
flower!--was either snatched from Zenobia's hand,
or flung wilfully away!